Common WordPress Troubleshooting Techniques

In this tutorial:

WordPress is one of the many great tools InMotion Hosting offers to their customers to build dynamically driven websites. At times, you may find yourself having to troubleshoot errors in your WordPress website. Here we'll discuss some basic techniques when troubleshooting some common errors in WordPress.

Turn on WordPress Debugging

With debugging turned on, it is much easier to locate any errors within your WordPress site as well as any plugins and themes that may be causing errors. This is covered in our full guide:Turning on WordPress debugging.

Disabling your WordPress Plugins

Some plugins may interfere with other plugins and cause your WordPress site not to load correctly. A common troubleshooting technique is to disable all of your WordPress plugins. If this resolves the issue, then you'll want to enable each plugin one by one and test your site until you determine which plugin is causing the issue.

Some problems caused by plugins will prevent you from logging into your dashboard. If you still can log into your dashboard, then navigate to your plugins page and continue to disable all your plugins and test as described above. If you do not have access to your WordPress dashboard, however, you can use an FTP client such as FileZilla to rename your plugins folder (which will disable all of your plugins). Click here for more information on disabling your WordPress plugins.

Disabling your Current Theme and reverting to the Default

Some themes include custom functions that, at times can cause errors. When troubleshooting issues, it is important to determine if the error is related to a theme. To do this, you should change your theme to the default theme in your WordPress installation. This should be one of the first steps you take in troubleshooting errors in WordPress. If your error is resolved by reverting the theme to the default, then you know it's an issue with your chosen theme.

If you have access to the WordPress dashboard this is achieved by going into the themes option on the left side menu pane and activating the default theme. If you do not have WordPress dashboard access, and in some cases with errors this may be true, you can disable your theme by FTP as well. Once you are connected via FTP with an FTP client such as FileZilla, you then will navigate to your themes folder. Rename your current theme and WordPress will automatically revert to the default theme.

Other Common Errors

404 File not found errors: When you see a file not found error, you will see see a full path to the file that is missing. Retrace the path via FTP and see if the file exists. Remember, you are on a linux server so file names are case sensitive. Test.php is not the same file as test.php. 404 errors are commonly associated with permalinks or the coding in the index or search files as well. Resetting WordPress Permalinks often will rebuild the links and correct the problem.

Memory Exhausted errors: This is an error that typically mean you have not allocated enough memory for php to run the desired action. The error message will look similar to this:

This can be corrected by adjusting your memory allocation in your php.ini file. You should have a php.ini file in your default folder where you installed WordPress. If you do not, you can find the file in your public_html folder and copy to the same location as WordPress. Once the file is in it's correct place, you will need to open it up in an editor. You can do this in File Manager in cPanel. Find the line of code that says:

memory_limit = 8M

Now you will need to change it to something like this:

memory_limit = 16M

NOTE: you may need to keep adjusting this number to find out how much memory you need to allocate. If 16M does not work increase the number to 32M.

WordPress showing a blank page: If your WordPress website is showing a blank page, it's typically caused by a php error. If php is configured to hide this error, you'll get a blank page displaying on your website. Please read our article on how to handle blank pages in WordPress

Thank you for contacting us. As described above, you can disable your theme by FTP. Once you are connected via FTP with an FTP client such as FileZilla, you then will navigate to your themes folder. Rename your current theme and WordPress will automatically revert to the default theme.

Have you tried this?

Please explain the symptoms you are having, when you try to change themes.

Sorry for the problem with the WordPress site. Even with the screenshot, it's difficult to tell what you have done in order to generate that error page. Bascially, if it's not there, then that means a page is missing. The pages/posts are kept in the database. If someone has not deleted it then there's a possibility that there's a problem with loading the data from the database. Make sure to try repairing the database. Otherwise, you should use a backup to recover. It doesn't appear like you're an InMotion customer so we can't investigate it directly, but if you want for us to continue reviewing the issue, please give us the steps you're taking to duplicate the error.

Hello, excuse me, I'm still new to Wordpress and I'm currently facing a problem with my premium version. All of the icon images on my dashboard and theme don't show up properly, as you can see here, http://bacakabarbaru.com/. Any idea how to fix this issue?... Thanks a bunch mate.

OOPS! THAT PAGE CAN’T BE FOUND

If you are able to get into the admin dashboard, go down to the Settings >> Permalinks and change them to another selection. Save the setting and then set it back to what you had. Save that and you may be able to see the pages again.

i just uploaded my site http://algorhythmdigital.com/ a week ago, but now am trying to go back to the wordpress dashbaoard to edit a few things but i cant login, CANT even access the login page i keep getting this error msg

Not Found

The requested URL /wp-login.php was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

so i tried to do a restore backup wp in the restore/backup arear in my cpanel but the backup has been removed.